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Airlines and Air Mail: The Post Office and the Birth of the Commercial Aviation Industry. F. Robert van der Linden. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002. XV + 349 pp. Index, notes, bibliography, illustrations. Cloth, $35.00. ISBN 0-813-12219-8.
During the 1920s and the early 1930s, a coalition of public policymakers and industry leaders launched two initiatives that laid the foundation for the emerging commercial aviation industry in the United States. To build public confidence in this new form of transportation, the Air Commerce Act of 1926 directed the federal government, largely through the Department of Commerce, to set and enforce safety standards for aircraft construction and operation. This legislation was passed immediately after the Kelly Air Mail Act of 1925, which authorized the Post Office Department to begin awarding airmail contracts to commercial carriers, thereby providing a subsidy for operators while they built a customer base of passengers and freight from the private sector.
Robert van der Linden, curator of air transportation at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum, has produced a first-rate study of the role the Post Office Department played in the growth of commercial aviation. As van der Linden notes, the most important figure in commercial aviation policy during this era was Herbert Hoover's postmaster general, Walter F. Brown, and he devotes considerable space to this often misunderstood figure. Van der Linden emphasizes Brown's progressive heritage in explaining the postmaster general's approach to commercial aviation. Deeply influenced...